Search

Special districts are an increasingly important part of the local government equation in the United States, representing over forty percent of local governments. The spread of these governments is controversial, however, as some argue that they will have a negative impact on service delivery, due to a perceived lack of political accountability. Others argue that their focus on single policy issues allow them to more efficiently respond to the citizens they serve. Despite the controversy, only a few studies have quantitatively investigated the differences in service delivery between special district and general purpose governments. Building on Mullin's earlier work, in this research note we investigate the relationship between specialized local government and water utility rates. We find little direct difference between special districts and general-purpose governments, with some minimal support for a conditional relationship between special districts and scarcity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant proportion of the US population does not believe that climate change is a serious problem and immediate action is necessary. We ask whether individuals' experiences with long-run changes in their local climate can override the power of partisanship that appears to dominate this opinion process. We merge individual-level data on climate change perceptions and the main determinants previously identified by the literature with county-level data on an exogenous measure of local climate change. While we find that local climate change significantly affects perceptions and in the expected direction, partisanship and political ideology maintain the strongest effect. We then field a randomized online experiment to test whether partisanship also drives support for pro-climate policies and the willingness to make environmentally friendly individual choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]